94:0.1 THE early teachers of the Salem religion
penetrated to the remotest tribes of Africa and Eurasia, ever preaching
Machiventa's gospel of man's faith and trust in the one universal God as the
only price of obtaining divine favor. Melchizedek's covenant with Abraham was
the pattern for all the early propaganda that went out from Salem and other
centers. Urantia has never had more enthusiastic and aggressive missionaries
of any religion than these noble men and women who carried the teachings of
Melchizedek over the entire Eastern Hemisphere. These missionaries were
recruited from many peoples and races, and they largely spread their teachings
through the medium of native converts. They established training centers in
different parts of the world where they taught the natives the Salem religion
and then commissioned these pupils to function as teachers among their own
people.

1. THE SALEM TEACHINGS IN VEDIC INDIA

94:1.1 In the days of Melchizedek, India was a
cosmopolitan country which had recently come under the political and religious
dominance of the Aryan-Andite invaders from the north and west. At this time
only the northern and western portions of the peninsula had been extensively
permeated by the Aryans. These Vedic newcomers had brought along with them
their many tribal deities. Their religious forms of worship followed closely
the ceremonial practices of their earlier Andite forebears in that the father
still functioned as a priest and the mother as a priestess, and the family
hearth was still utilized as an altar.

94:1.2 The Vedic cult was then in process of growth
and metamorphosis under the direction of the Brahman caste of teacher-priests,
who were gradually assuming control over the expanding ritual of worship. The
amalgamation of the onetime thirty-three Aryan deities was well under way when
the Salem missionaries penetrated the north of India.

94:1.3 The polytheism of these Aryans represented a
degeneration of their earlier monotheism occasioned by their separation into
tribal units, each tribe having its venerated god. This devolution of the
original monotheism and trinitarianism of Andite Mesopotamia was in process of
resynthesis in the early centuries of the second millennium before Christ. The
many gods were organized into a pantheon under the triune leadership of Dyaus
pitar, the lord of heaven; Indra, the tempestuous lord of the atmosphere; and
Agni, the three-headed fire god, lord of the earth and the vestigial symbol of
an earlier Trinity concept.

94:1.4 Definite henotheistic developments were
paving the way for an evolved monotheism. Agni, the most ancient deity, was
often exalted as the father-head of the entire pantheon. The deity-father
principle, sometimes called Prajapati, sometimes termed Brahma, was submerged
in the theologic battle which the Brahman priests later fought with the Salem
teachers. The Brahman was conceived as the energy-divinity principle
activating the entire Vedic pantheon.

94:1.5 The Salem missionaries preached the one God
of Melchizedek, the Most High of heaven. This portrayal was not altogether
disharmonious with the emerging concept of the Father-Brahma as the source of
all gods, but the Salem doctrine was nonritualistic and hence ran directly
counter to the dogmas, traditions, and teachings of the Brahman priesthood.
Never would the Brahman priests accept the Salem teaching of salvation through
faith, favor with God apart from ritualistic observances and sacrificial
ceremonials.

94:1.6 The rejection of the Melchizedek gospel of
trust in God and salvation through faith marked a vital turning point for
India. The Salem missionaries had contributed much to the loss of faith in all
the ancient Vedic gods, but the leaders, the priests of Vedism, refused to
accept the Melchizedek teaching of one God and one simple faith.

94:1.7 The Brahmans culled the sacred writings of
their day in an effort to combat the Salem teachers, and this compilation, as
later revised, has come on down to modern times as the Rig-Veda, one of the
most ancient of sacred books. The second, third, and fourth Vedas followed as
the Brahmans sought to crystallize, formalize, and fix their rituals of
worship and sacrifice upon the peoples of those days. Taken at their best,
these writings are the equal of any other body of similar character in beauty
of concept and truth of discernment. But as this superior religion became
contaminated with the thousands upon thousands of superstitions, cults, and
rituals of southern India, it progressively metamorphosed into the most
variegated system of theology ever developed by mortal man. An examination of
the Vedas will disclose some of the highest and some of the most debased
concepts of Deity ever to be conceived.

2. BRAHMANISM

94:2.1 As the Salem missionaries penetrated
southward into the Dravidian Deccan, they encountered an increasing caste
system, the scheme of the Aryans to prevent loss of racial identity in the
face of a rising tide of the secondary Sangik peoples. Since the Brahman
priest caste was the very essence of this system, this social order greatly
retarded the progress of the Salem teachers. This caste system failed to save
the Aryan race, but it did succeed in perpetuating the Brahmans, who, in turn,
have maintained their religious hegemony in India to the present
time.

94:2.2 And now, with the weakening of Vedism through
the rejection of higher truth, the cult of the Aryans became subject to
increasing inroads from the Deccan. In a desperate effort to stem the tide of
racial extinction and religious obliteration, the Brahman caste sought to
exalt themselves above all else. They taught that the sacrifice to deity in
itself was all-efficacious, that it was all-compelling in its potency. They
proclaimed that, of the two essential divine principles of the universe, one
was Brahman the deity, and the other was the Brahman priesthood. Among no
other Urantia peoples did the priests presume to exalt themselves above even
their gods, to relegate to themselves the honors due their gods. But they went
so absurdly far with these presumptuous claims that the whole precarious
system collapsed before the debasing cults which poured in from the
surrounding and less advanced civilizations. The vast Vedic priesthood itself
floundered and sank beneath the black flood of inertia and pessimism which
their own selfish and unwise presumption had brought upon all
India.

94:2.3 The undue concentration on self led certainly
to a fear of the nonevolutionary perpetuation of self in an endless round of
successive incarnations as man, beast, or weeds. And of all the contaminating
beliefs which could have become fastened upon what may have been an emerging
monotheism, none was so stultifying as this belief in transmigration -- the
doctrine of the reincarnation of souls -- which came from the Dravidian
Deccan. This belief in the weary and monotonous round of repeated
transmigrations robbed struggling mortals of their long-cherished hope of
finding that deliverance and spiritual advancement in death which had been a
part of the earlier Vedic faith.

94:2.4 This philosophically debilitating teaching
was soon followed by the invention of the doctrine of the eternal escape from
self by submergence in the universal rest and peace of absolute union with
Brahman, the oversoul of all creation. Mortal desire and human ambition were
effectually ravished and virtually destroyed. For more than two thousand years
the better minds of India have sought to escape from all desire, and thus was
opened wide the door for the entrance of those later cults and teachings which
have virtually shackled the souls of many Hindu peoples in the chains of
spiritual hopelessness. Of all civilizations, the Vedic-Aryan paid the most
terrible price for its rejection of the Salem gospel.

94:2.5 Caste alone could not perpetuate the Aryan
religio-cultural system, and as the inferior religions of the Deccan permeated
the north, there developed an age of despair and hopelessness. It was during
these dark days that the cult of taking no life arose, and it has ever since
persisted. Many of the new cults were frankly atheistic, claiming that such
salvation as was attainable could come only by man's own unaided efforts. But
throughout a great deal of all this unfortunate philosophy, distorted remnants
of the Melchizedek and even the Adamic teachings can be traced.

94:2.6 These were the times of the compilation of
the later scriptures of the Hindu faith, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads.
Having rejected the teachings of personal religion through the personal faith
experience with the one God, and having become contaminated with the flood of
debasing and debilitating cults and creeds from the Deccan, with their
anthropomorphisms and reincarnations, the Brahmanic priesthood experienced a
violent reaction against these vitiating beliefs; there was a definite effort
to seek and to find true reality. The Brahmans set out to
deanthropomorphize the Indian concept of deity, but in so doing they stumbled
into the grievous error of depersonalizing the concept of God, and they
emerged, not with a lofty and spiritual ideal of the Paradise Father, but with
a distant and metaphysical idea of an all-encompassing Absolute.

94:2.7 In their efforts at self-preservation the
Brahmans had rejected the one God of Melchizedek, and now they found
themselves with the hypothesis of Brahman, that indefinite and illusive
philosophic self, that impersonal and impotent it which has left the
spiritual life of India helpless and prostrate from that unfortunate day to
the twentieth century.

94:2.8 It was during the times of the writing of the
Upanishads that Buddhism arose in India. But despite its successes of a
thousand years, it could not compete with later Hinduism; despite a higher
morality, its early portrayal of God was even less well-defined than was that
of Hinduism, which provided for lesser and personal deities. Buddhism finally
gave way in northern India before the onslaught of a militant Islam with its
clear-cut concept of Allah as the supreme God of the universe.

3. BRAHMANIC PHILOSOPHY

94:3.1 While the highest phase of Brahmanism was
hardly a religion, it was truly one of the most noble reaches of the mortal
mind into the domains of philosophy and metaphysics. Having started out to
discover final reality, the Indian mind did not stop until it had speculated
about almost every phase of theology excepting the essential dual concept of
religion: the existence of the Universal Father of all universe creatures and
the fact of the ascending experience in the universe of these very creatures
as they seek to attain the eternal Father, who has commanded them to be
perfect, even as he is perfect.

94:3.2 In the concept of Brahman the minds of those
days truly grasped at the idea of some all-pervading Absolute, for this
postulate was at one and the same time identified as creative energy and
cosmic reaction. Brahman was conceived to be beyond all definition, capable of
being comprehended only by the successive negation of all finite qualities. It
was definitely a belief in an absolute, even an infinite, being, but this
concept was largely devoid of personality attributes and was therefore not
experiencible by individual religionists.

94:3.3 Brahman-Narayana was conceived as the
Absolute, the infinite IT IS, the primordial creative potency of the potential
cosmos, the Universal Self existing static and potential throughout all
eternity. Had the philosophers of those days been able to make the next
advance in deity conception, had they been able to conceive of the Brahman as
associative and creative, as a personality approachable by created and
evolving beings, then might such a teaching have become the most advanced
portraiture of Deity on Urantia since it would have encompassed the first five
levels of total deity function and might possibly have envisioned the
remaining two.

94:3.4 In certain phases the concept of the One
Universal Oversoul as the totality of the summation of all creature existence
led the Indian philosophers very close to the truth of the Supreme Being, but
this truth availed them naught because they failed to evolve any reasonable or
rational personal approach to the attainment of their theoretic monotheistic
goal of Brahman-Narayana.

94:3.5 The karma principle of causality continuity
is, again, very close to the truth of the repercussional synthesis of all
time-space actions in the Deity presence of the Supreme; but this postulate
never provided for the co-ordinate personal attainment of Deity by the
individual religionist, only for the ultimate engulfment of all personality by
the Universal Oversoul.

94:3.6 The philosophy of Brahmanism also came very
near to the realization of the indwelling of the Thought Adjusters, only to
become perverted through the misconception of truth. The teaching that the
soul is the indwelling of the Brahman would have paved the way for an advanced
religion had not this concept been completely vitiated by the belief that
there is no human individuality apart from this indwelling of the Universal
One.

94:3.7 In the doctrine of the merging of the
self-soul with the Oversoul, the theologians of India failed to provide for
the survival of something human, something new and unique, something born of
the union of the will of man and the will of God. The teaching of the soul's
return to the Brahman is closely parallel to the truth of the Adjuster's
return to the bosom of the Universal Father, but there is something distinct
from the Adjuster which also survives, the morontial counterpart of mortal
personality. And this vital concept was fatally absent from Brahmanic
philosophy.

94:3.8 Brahmanic philosophy has approximated many of
the facts of the universe and has approached numerous cosmic truths, but it
has all too often fallen victim to the error of failing to differentiate
between the several levels of reality, such as absolute, transcendental, and
finite. It has failed to take into account that what may be finite-illusory on
the absolute level may be absolutely real on the finite level. And it has also
taken no cognizance of the essential personality of the Universal Father, who
is personally contactable on all levels from the evolutionary creature's
limited experience with God on up to the limitless experience of the Eternal
Son with the Paradise Father.

4. THE HINDU RELIGION

94:4.1 With the passing of the centuries in India,
the populace returned in measure to the ancient rituals of the Vedas as they
had been modified by the teachings of the Melchizedek missionaries and
crystallized by the later Brahman priesthood. This, the oldest and most
cosmopolitan of the world's religions, has undergone further changes in
response to Buddhism and Jainism and to the later appearing influences of
Mohammedanism and Christianity. But by the time the teachings of Jesus
arrived, they had already become so Occidentalized as to be a "white man's
religion," hence strange and foreign to the Hindu mind.

94:4.2 Hindu theology, at present, depicts four
descending levels of deity and divinity:

94:4.3 1. The Brahman, the Absolute, the
Infinite One, the IT IS.

94:4.4 2. The Trimurti, the supreme trinity
of Hinduism. In this association Brahma, the first member, is conceived as
being self-created out of the Brahman -- infinity. Were it not for close
identification with the pantheistic Infinite One, Brahma could constitute the
foundation for a concept of the Universal Father. Brahma is also identified
with fate.

94:4.5 The worship of the second and third members,
Siva and Vishnu, arose in the first millennium after Christ. Siva is
lord of life and death, god of fertility, and master of destruction.
Vishnu is extremely popular due to the belief that he periodically
incarnates in human form. In this way, Vishnu becomes real and living in the
imaginations of the Indians. Siva and Vishnu are each regarded by some as
supreme over all.

94:4.6 3. Vedic and post-Vedic deities. Many
of the ancient gods of the Aryans, such as Agni, Indra, Soma, have persisted
as secondary to the three members of the Trimurti. Numerous additional gods
have arisen since the early days of Vedic India, and these have also been
incorporated into the Hindu pantheon.

94:4.8 While Hinduism has long failed to vivify the
Indian people, at the same time it has usually been a tolerant religion. Its
great strength lies in the fact that it has proved to be the most adaptive,
amorphic religion to appear on Urantia. It is capable of almost unlimited
change and possesses an unusual range of flexible adjustment from the high and
semimonotheistic speculations of the intellectual Brahman to the arrant
fetishism and primitive cult practices of the debased and depressed classes of
ignorant believers.

94:4.9 Hinduism has survived because it is
essentially an integral part of the basic social fabric of India. It has no
great hierarchy which can be disturbed or destroyed; it is interwoven into the
life pattern of the people. It has an adaptability to changing conditions that
excels all other cults, and it displays a tolerant attitude of adoption toward
many other religions, Gautama Buddha and even Christ himself being claimed as
incarnations of Vishnu.

94:4.10 Today, in India, the great need is for the
portrayal of the Jesusonian gospel -- the Fatherhood of God and the sonship
and consequent brotherhood of all men, which is personally realized in loving
ministry and social service. In India the philosophical framework is existent,
the cult structure is present; all that is needed is the vitalizing spark of
the dynamic love portrayed in the original gospel of the Son of Man, divested
of the Occidental dogmas and doctrines which have tended to make Michael's
life bestowal a white man's religion.

5. THE STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH IN CHINA

94:5.1 As the Salem missionaries passed through
Asia, spreading the doctrine of the Most High God and salvation through faith,
they absorbed much of the philosophy and religious thought of the various
countries traversed. But the teachers commissioned by Melchizedek and his
successors did not default in their trust; they did penetrate to all peoples
of the Eurasian continent, and it was in the middle of the second millennium
before Christ that they arrived in China. At See Fuch, for more than one
hundred years, the Salemites maintained their headquarters, there training
Chinese teachers who taught throughout all the domains of the yellow
race.

94:5.2 It was in direct consequence of this teaching
that the earliest form of Taoism arose in China, a vastly different religion
than the one which bears that name today. Early or proto-Taoism was a compound
of the following factors:

94:5.3 1. The lingering teachings of Singlangton,
which persisted in the concept of Shang-ti, the God of Heaven. In the times of
Singlangton the Chinese people became virtually monotheistic; they
concentrated their worship on the One Truth, later known as the Spirit of
Heaven, the universe ruler. And the yellow race never fully lost this early
concept of Deity, although in subsequent centuries many subordinate gods and
spirits insidiously crept into their religion.

94:5.4 2. The Salem religion of a Most High Creator
Deity who would bestow his favor upon mankind in response to man's faith. But
it is all too true that, by the time the Melchizedek missionaries had
penetrated to the lands of the yellow race, their original message had become
considerably changed from the simple doctrines of Salem in the days of
Machiventa.

94:5.5 3. The Brahman-Absolute concept of the Indian
philosophers, coupled with the desire to escape all evil. Perhaps the greatest
extraneous influence in the eastward spread of the Salem religion was exerted
by the Indian teachers of the Vedic faith, who injected their conception of
the Brahman -- the Absolute -- into the salvationistic thought of the
Salemites.

94:5.6 This composite belief spread through the
lands of the yellow and brown races as an underlying influence in
religio-philosophic thought. In Japan this proto-Taoism was known as Shinto,
and in this country, far distant from Salem of Palestine, the peoples learned
of the incarnation of Machiventa Melchizedek, who dwelt upon earth that the
name of God might not be forgotten by mankind.

94:5.7 In China all of these beliefs were later
confused and compounded with the ever-growing cult of ancestor worship. But
never since the time of Singlangton have the Chinese fallen into helpless
slavery to priestcraft. The yellow race was the first to emerge from barbaric
bondage into orderly civilization because it was the first to achieve some
measure of freedom from the abject fear of the gods, not even fearing the
ghosts of the dead as other races feared them. China met her defeat because
she failed to progress beyond her early emancipation from priests; she fell
into an almost equally calamitous error, the worship of ancestors.

94:5.8 But the Salemites did not labor in vain. It
was upon the foundations of their gospel that the great philosophers of
sixth-century China built their teachings. The moral atmosphere and the
spiritual sentiments of the times of Lao-tse and Confucius grew up out of the
teachings of the Salem missionaries of an earlier age.

6. LAO-TSE AND CONFUCIUS

94:6.1 About six hundred years before the arrival of
Michael, it seemed to Melchizedek, long since departed from the flesh, that
the purity of his teaching on earth was being unduly jeopardized by general
absorption into the older Urantia beliefs. It appeared for a time that his
mission as a forerunner of Michael might be in danger of failing. And in the
sixth century before Christ, through an unusual co-ordination of spiritual
agencies, not all of which are understood even by the planetary supervisors,
Urantia witnessed a most unusual presentation of manifold religious truth.
Through the agency of several human teachers the Salem gospel was restated and
revitalized, and as it was then presented, much has persisted to the times of
this writing.

94:6.2 This unique century of spiritual progress was
characterized by great religious, moral, and philosophic teachers all over the
civilized world. In China, the two outstanding teachers were Lao-tse and
Confucius.

94:6.3Lao-tse built directly upon the
concepts of the Salem traditions when he declared Tao to be the One First
Cause of all creation. Lao was a man of great spiritual vision. He taught that
"man's eternal destiny was everlasting union with Tao, Supreme God and
Universal King." His comprehension of ultimate causation was most discerning,
for he wrote: "Unity arises out of the Absolute Tao, and from Unity there
appears cosmic Duality, and from such Duality, Trinity springs forth into
existence, and Trinity is the primal source of all reality." "All reality is
ever in balance between the potentials and the actuals of the cosmos, and
these are eternally harmonized by the spirit of divinity."

94:6.4 Lao-tse also made one of the earliest
presentations of the doctrine of returning good for evil: "Goodness begets
goodness, but to the one who is truly good, evil also begets
goodness."

94:6.5 He taught the return of the creature to the
Creator and pictured life as the emergence of a personality from the cosmic
potentials, while death was like the returning home of this creature
personality. His concept of true faith was unusual, and he too likened it to
the "attitude of a little child."

94:6.6 His understanding of the eternal purpose of
God was clear, for he said: "The Absolute Deity does not strive but is always
victorious; he does not coerce mankind but always stands ready to respond to
their true desires; the will of God is eternal in patience and eternal in the
inevitability of its expression." And of the true religionist he said, in
expressing the truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive: "The
good man seeks not to retain truth for himself but rather attempts to bestow
these riches upon his fellows, for that is the realization of truth. The will
of the Absolute God always benefits, never destroys; the purpose of the true
believer is always to act but never to coerce."

94:6.7 Lao's teaching of nonresistance and the
distinction which he made between action and coercion became
later perverted into the beliefs of "seeing, doing, and thinking nothing." But
Lao never taught such error, albeit his presentation of nonresistance has been
a factor in the further development of the pacific predilections of the
Chinese peoples.

94:6.8 But the popular Taoism of twentieth-century
Urantia has very little in common with the lofty sentiments and the cosmic
concepts of the old philosopher who taught the truth as he perceived it, which
was: That faith in the Absolute God is the source of that divine energy which
will remake the world, and by which man ascends to spiritual union with Tao,
the Eternal Deity and Creator Absolute of the universes.

94:6.9Confucius (Kung Fu-tze) was a younger
contemporary of Lao in sixth-century China. Confucius based his doctrines upon
the better moral traditions of the long history of the yellow race, and he was
also somewhat influenced by the lingering traditions of the Salem
missionaries. His chief work consisted in the compilation of the wise sayings
of ancient philosophers. He was a rejected teacher during his lifetime, but
his writings and teachings have ever since exerted a great influence in China
and Japan. Confucius set a new pace for the shamans in that he put morality in
the place of magic. But he built too well; he made a new fetish out of
order and established a respect for ancestral conduct that is still
venerated by the Chinese at the time of this writing.

94:6.10 The Confucian preachment of morality was
predicated on the theory that the earthly way is the distorted shadow of the
heavenly way; that the true pattern of temporal civilization is the mirror
reflection of the eternal order of heaven. The potential God concept in
Confucianism was almost completely subordinated to the emphasis placed upon
the Way of Heaven, the pattern of the cosmos.

94:6.11 The teachings of Lao have been lost to all
but a few in the Orient, but the writings of Confucius have ever since
constituted the basis of the moral fabric of the culture of almost a third of
Urantians. These Confucian precepts, while perpetuating the best of the past,
were somewhat inimical to the very Chinese spirit of investigation that had
produced those achievements which were so venerated. The influence of these
doctrines was unsuccessfully combated both by the imperial efforts of Ch'in
Shih Huang Ti and by the teachings of Mo Ti, who proclaimed a brotherhood
founded not on ethical duty but on the love of God. He sought to rekindle the
ancient quest for new truth, but his teachings failed before the vigorous
opposition of the disciples of Confucius.

94:6.12 Like many other spiritual and moral
teachers, both Confucius and Lao-tse were eventually deified by their
followers in those spiritually dark ages of China which intervened between the
decline and perversion of the Taoist faith and the coming of the Buddhist
missionaries from India. During these spiritually decadent centuries the
religion of the yellow race degenerated into a pitiful theology wherein
swarmed devils, dragons, and evil spirits, all betokening the returning fears
of the unenlightened mortal mind. And China, once at the head of human society
because of an advanced religion, then fell behind because of temporary failure
to progress in the true path of the development of that God-consciousness
which is indispensable to the true progress, not only of the individual
mortal, but also of the intricate and complex civilizations which characterize
the advance of culture and society on an evolutionary planet of time and
space.

7. GAUTAMA SIDDHARTHA

94:7.1 Contemporary with Lao-tse and Confucius in
China, another great teacher of truth arose in India. Gautama Siddhartha was
born in the sixth century before Christ in the north Indian province of Nepal.
His followers later made it appear that he was the son of a fabulously wealthy
ruler, but, in truth, he was the heir apparent to the throne of a petty
chieftain who ruled by sufferance over a small and secluded mountain valley in
the southern Himalayas.

94:7.2 Gautama formulated those theories which grew
into the philosophy of Buddhism after six years of the futile practice of
Yoga. Siddhartha made a determined but unavailing fight against the growing
caste system. There was a lofty sincerity and a unique unselfishness about
this young prophet prince that greatly appealed to the men of those days. He
detracted from the practice of seeking individual salvation through physical
affliction and personal pain. And he exhorted his followers to carry his
gospel to all the world.

94:7.3 Amid the confusion and extreme cult practices
of India, the saner and more moderate teachings of Gautama came as a
refreshing relief. He denounced gods, priests, and their sacrifices, but he
too failed to perceive the personality of the One Universal. Not
believing in the existence of individual human souls, Gautama, of course, made
a valiant fight against the time-honored belief in transmigration of the soul.
He made a noble effort to deliver men from fear, to make them feel at ease and
at home in the great universe, but he failed to show them the pathway to that
real and supernal home of ascending mortals -- Paradise -- and to the
expanding service of eternal existence.

94:7.4 Gautama was a real prophet, and had he heeded
the instruction of the hermit Godad, he might have aroused all India by the
inspiration of the revival of the Salem gospel of salvation by faith. Godad
was descended through a family that had never lost the traditions of the
Melchizedek missionaries.

94:7.5 At Benares Gautama founded his school, and it
was during its second year that a pupil, Bautan, imparted to his teacher the
traditions of the Salem missionaries about the Melchizedek covenant with
Abraham; and while Siddhartha did not have a very clear concept of the
Universal Father, he took an advanced stand on salvation through faith --
simple belief. He so declared himself before his followers and began sending
his students out in groups of sixty to proclaim to the people of India "the
glad tidings of free salvation; that all men, high and low, can attain bliss
by faith in righteousness and justice."

94:7.6 Gautama's wife believed her husband's gospel
and was the founder of an order of nuns. His son became his successor and
greatly extended the cult; he grasped the new idea of salvation through faith
but in his later years wavered regarding the Salem gospel of divine favor
through faith alone, and in his old age his dying words were, "Work out your
own salvation."

94:7.7 When proclaimed at its best, Gautama's gospel
of universal salvation, free from sacrifice, torture, ritual, and priests, was
a revolutionary and amazing doctrine for its time. And it came surprisingly
near to being a revival of the Salem gospel. It brought succor to millions of
despairing souls, and notwithstanding its grotesque perversion during later
centuries, it still persists as the hope of millions of human
beings.

94:7.8 Siddhartha taught far more truth than has
survived in the modern cults bearing his name. Modern Buddhism is no more the
teachings of Gautama Siddhartha than is Christianity the teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth.

8. THE BUDDHIST FAITH

94:8.1 To become a Buddhist, one merely made public
profession of the faith by reciting the Refuge: "I take my refuge in the
Buddha; I take my refuge in the Doctrine; I take my refuge in the
Brotherhood."

94:8.2 Buddhism took origin in a historic person,
not in a myth. Gautama's followers called him Sasta, meaning master or
teacher. While he made no superhuman claims for either himself or his
teachings, his disciples early began to call him the enlightened one,
the Buddha; later on, Sakyamuni Buddha.

94:8.3 The original gospel of Gautama was based on
the four noble truths:

1. The noble truths of suffering.

2. The origins of suffering.

3. The destruction of suffering.

4. The way to the destruction of suffering.

94:8.4 Closely linked to the doctrine of suffering
and the escape therefrom was the philosophy of the Eightfold Path: right
views, aspirations, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and
contemplation. It was not Gautama's intention to attempt to destroy all
effort, desire, and affection in the escape from suffering; rather was his
teaching designed to picture to mortal man the futility of pinning all hope
and aspirations entirely on temporal goals and material objectives. It was not
so much that love of one's fellows should be shunned as that the true believer
should also look beyond the associations of this material world to the
realities of the eternal future.

94:8.5 The moral commandments of Gautama's
preachment were five in number:

94:8.6 1. You shall not kill.

94:8.7 2. You shall not steal.

94:8.8 3. You shall not be unchaste.

94:8.9 4. You shall not lie.

94:8.10 5. You shall not drink intoxicating
liquors.

94:8.11 There were several additional or secondary
commandments, whose observance was optional with believers.

94:8.12 Siddhartha hardly believed in the
immortality of the human personality; his philosophy only provided for a sort
of functional continuity. He never clearly defined what he meant to include in
the doctrine of Nirvana. The fact that it could theoretically be experienced
during mortal existence would indicate that it was not viewed as a state of
complete annihilation. It implied a condition of supreme enlightenment and
supernal bliss wherein all fetters binding man to the material world had been
broken; there was freedom from the desires of mortal life and deliverance from
all danger of ever again experiencing incarnation.

94:8.13 According to the original teachings of
Gautama, salvation is achieved by human effort, apart from divine help; there
is no place for saving faith or prayers to superhuman powers. Gautama, in his
attempt to minimize the superstitions of India, endeavored to turn men away
from the blatant claims of magical salvation. And in making this effort, he
left the door wide open for his successors to misinterpret his teaching and to
proclaim that all human striving for attainment is distasteful and painful.
His followers overlooked the fact that the highest happiness is linked with
the intelligent and enthusiastic pursuit of worthy goals, and that such
achievements constitute true progress in cosmic self-realization.

94:8.14 The great truth of Siddhartha's teaching was
his proclamation of a universe of absolute justice. He taught the best godless
philosophy ever invented by mortal man; it was the ideal humanism and most
effectively removed all grounds for superstition, magical rituals, and fear of
ghosts or demons.

94:8.15 The great weakness in the original gospel of
Buddhism was that it did not produce a religion of unselfish social service.
The Buddhistic brotherhood was, for a long time, not a fraternity of believers
but rather a community of student teachers. Gautama forbade their receiving
money and thereby sought to prevent the growth of hierarchal tendencies.
Gautama himself was highly social; indeed, his life was much greater than his
preachment.

9. THE SPREAD OF BUDDHISM

94:9.1 Buddhism prospered because it offered
salvation through belief in the Buddha, the enlightened one. It was more
representative of the Melchizedek truths than any other religious system to be
found throughout eastern Asia. But Buddhism did not become widespread as a
religion until it was espoused in self-protection by the low-caste monarch
Asoka, who, next to Ikhnaton in Egypt, was one of the most remarkable civil
rulers between Melchizedek and Michael. Asoka built a great Indian empire
through the propaganda of his Buddhist missionaries. During a period of
twenty-five years he trained and sent forth more than seventeen thousand
missionaries to the farthest frontiers of all the known world. In one
generation he made Buddhism the dominant religion of one half the world. It
soon became established in Tibet, Kashmir, Ceylon, Burma, Java, Siam, Korea,
China, and Japan. And generally speaking, it was a religion vastly superior to
those which it supplanted or upstepped.

94:9.2 The spread of Buddhism from its homeland in
India to all of Asia is one of the thrilling stories of the spiritual devotion
and missionary persistence of sincere religionists. The teachers of Gautama's
gospel not only braved the perils of the overland caravan routes but faced the
dangers of the China Seas as they pursued their mission over the Asiatic
continent, bringing to all peoples the message of their faith. But this
Buddhism was no longer the simple doctrine of Gautama; it was the miraculized
gospel which made him a god. And the farther Buddhism spread from its highland
home in India, the more unlike the teachings of Gautama it became, and the
more like the religions it supplanted, it grew to be.

94:9.3 Buddhism, later on, was much affected by
Taoism in China, Shinto in Japan, and Christianity in Tibet. After a thousand
years, in India Buddhism simply withered and expired. It became Brahmanized
and later abjectly surrendered to Islam, while throughout much of the rest of
the Orient it degenerated into a ritual which Gautama Siddhartha would never
have recognized.

94:9.4 In the south the fundamentalist stereotype of
the teachings of Siddhartha persisted in Ceylon, Burma, and the Indo-China
peninsula. This is the Hinayana division of Buddhism which clings to the early
or asocial doctrine.

94:9.5 But even before the collapse in India, the
Chinese and north Indian groups of Gautama's followers had begun the
development of the Mahayana teaching of the "Great Road" to salvation in
contrast with the purists of the south who held to the Hinayana, or "Lesser
Road." And these Mahayanists cast loose from the social limitations inherent
in the Buddhist doctrine, and ever since has this northern division of
Buddhism continued to evolve in China and Japan.

94:9.6 Buddhism is a living, growing religion today
because it succeeds in conserving many of the highest moral values of its
adherents. It promotes calmness and self-control, augments serenity and
happiness, and does much to prevent sorrow and mourning. Those who believe
this philosophy live better lives than many who do not.

10. RELIGION IN TIBET

94:10.1 In Tibet may be found the strangest
association of the Melchizedek teachings combined with Buddhism, Hinduism,
Taoism, and Christianity. When the Buddhist missionaries entered Tibet, they
encountered a state of primitive savagery very similar to that which the early
Christian missionaries found among the northern tribes of Europe.

94:10.2 These simple-minded Tibetans would not
wholly give up their ancient magic and charms. Examination of the religious
ceremonials of present-day Tibetan rituals reveals an overgrown brotherhood of
priests with shaven heads who practice an elaborate ritual embracing bells,
chants, incense, processionals, rosaries, images, charms, pictures, holy
water, gorgeous vestments, and elaborate choirs. They have rigid dogmas and
crystallized creeds, mystic rites and special fasts. Their hierarchy embraces
monks, nuns, abbots, and the Grand Lama. They pray to angels, saints, a Holy
Mother, and the gods. They practice confessions and believe in purgatory.
Their monasteries are extensive and their cathedrals magnificent. They keep up
an endless repetition of sacred rituals and believe that such ceremonials
bestow salvation. Prayers are fastened to a wheel, and with its turning they
believe the petitions become efficacious. Among no other people of modern
times can be found the observance of so much from so many religions; and it is
inevitable that such a cumulative liturgy would become inordinately cumbersome
and intolerably burdensome.

94:10.3 The Tibetans have something of all the
leading world religions except the simple teachings of the Jesusonian gospel:
sonship with God, brotherhood with man, and ever-ascending citizenship in the
eternal universe.

11. BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

94:11.1 Buddhism entered China in the first
millennium after Christ, and it fitted well into the religious customs of the
yellow race. In ancestor worship they had long prayed to the dead; now they
could also pray for them. Buddhism soon amalgamated with the lingering
ritualistic practices of disintegrating Taoism. This new synthetic religion
with its temples of worship and definite religious ceremonial soon became the
generally accepted cult of the peoples of China, Korea, and Japan.

94:11.2 While in some respects it is unfortunate
that Buddhism was not carried to the world until after Gautama's followers had
so perverted the traditions and teachings of the cult as to make of him a
divine being, nonetheless this myth of his human life, embellished as it was
with a multitude of miracles, proved very appealing to the auditors of the
northern or Mahayana gospel of Buddhism.

94:11.3 Some of his later followers taught that
Sakyamuni Buddha's spirit returned periodically to earth as a living Buddha,
thus opening the way for an indefinite perpetuation of Buddha images, temples,
rituals, and impostor "living Buddhas." Thus did the religion of the great
Indian protestant eventually find itself shackled with those very ceremonial
practices and ritualistic incantations against which he had so fearlessly
fought, and which he had so valiantly denounced.

94:11.4 The great advance made in Buddhist
philosophy consisted in its comprehension of the relativity of all truth.
Through the mechanism of this hypothesis Buddhists have been able to reconcile
and correlate the divergencies within their own religious scriptures as well
as the differences between their own and many others. It was taught that the
small truth was for little minds, the large truth for great minds.

94:11.5 This philosophy also held that the Buddha
(divine) nature resided in all men; that man, through his own endeavors, could
attain to the realization of this inner divinity. And this teaching is one of
the clearest presentations of the truth of the indwelling Adjusters ever to be
made by a Urantian religion.

94:11.6 But a great limitation in the original
gospel of Siddhartha, as it was interpreted by his followers, was that it
attempted the complete liberation of the human self from all the limitations
of the mortal nature by the technique of isolating the self from objective
reality. True cosmic self-realization results from identification with cosmic
reality and with the finite cosmos of energy, mind, and spirit, bounded by
space and conditioned by time.

94:11.7 But though the ceremonies and outward
observances of Buddhism became grossly contaminated with those of the lands to
which it traveled, this degeneration was not altogether the case in the
philosophical life of the great thinkers who, from time to time, embraced this
system of thought and belief. Through more than two thousand years, many of
the best minds of Asia have concentrated upon the problem of ascertaining
absolute truth and the truth of the Absolute.

94:11.8 The evolution of a high concept of the
Absolute was achieved through many channels of thought and by devious paths of
reasoning. The upward ascent of this doctrine of infinity was not so clearly
defined as was the evolution of the God concept in Hebrew theology.
Nevertheless, there were certain broad levels which the minds of the Buddhists
reached, tarried upon, and passed through on their way to the envisioning of
the Primal Source of universes:

94:11.9 1. The Gautama legend. At the base of
the concept was the historic fact of the life and teachings of Siddhartha, the
prophet prince of India. This legend grew in myth as it traveled through the
centuries and across the broad lands of Asia until it surpassed the status of
the idea of Gautama as the enlightened one and began to take on additional
attributes.

94:11.10 2. The many Buddhas. It was reasoned
that, if Gautama had come to the peoples of India, then, in the remote past
and in the remote future, the races of mankind must have been, and undoubtedly
would be, blessed with other teachers of truth. This gave rise to the teaching
that there were many Buddhas, an unlimited and infinite number, even that
anyone could aspire to become one -- to attain the divinity of a Buddha.

94:11.11 3. The Absolute Buddha. By the time
the number of Buddhas was approaching infinity, it became necessary for the
minds of those days to reunify this unwieldy concept. Accordingly it began to
be taught that all Buddhas were but the manifestation of some higher essence,
some Eternal One of infinite and unqualified existence, some Absolute Source
of all reality. From here on, the Deity concept of Buddhism, in its highest
form, becomes divorced from the human person of Gautama Siddhartha and casts
off from the anthropomorphic limitations which have held it in leash. This
final conception of the Buddha Eternal can well be identified as the Absolute,
sometimes even as the infinite I AM.

94:11.12 While this idea of Absolute Deity never
found great popular favor with the peoples of Asia, it did enable the
intellectuals of these lands to unify their philosophy and to harmonize their
cosmology. The concept of the Buddha Absolute is at times quasi-personal, at
times wholly impersonal -- even an infinite creative force. Such concepts,
though helpful to philosophy, are not vital to religious development. Even an
anthropomorphic Yahweh is of greater religious value than an infinitely remote
Absolute of Buddhism or Brahmanism.

94:11.13 At times the Absolute was even thought of
as contained within the infinite I AM. But these speculations were chill
comfort to the hungry multitudes who craved to hear words of promise, to hear
the simple gospel of Salem, that faith in God would assure divine favor and
eternal survival.

12. THE GOD CONCEPT OF BUDDHISM

94:12.1 The great weakness in the cosmology of
Buddhism was twofold: its contamination with many of the superstitions of
India and China and its sublimation of Gautama, first as the enlightened one,
and then as the Eternal Buddha. Just as Christianity has suffered from the
absorption of much erroneous human philosophy, so does Buddhism bear its human
birthmark. But the teachings of Gautama have continued to evolve during the
past two and one-half millenniums. The concept of Buddha, to an enlightened
Buddhist, is no more the human personality of Gautama than the concept of
Jehovah is identical with the spirit demon of Horeb to an enlightened
Christian. Paucity of terminology, together with the sentimental retention of
olden nomenclature, is often provocative of the failure to understand the true
significance of the evolution of religious concepts.

94:12.2 Gradually the concept of God, as contrasted
with the Absolute, began to appear in Buddhism. Its sources are back in the
early days of this differentiation of the followers of the Lesser Road and the
Greater Road. It was among the latter division of Buddhism that the dual
conception of God and the Absolute finally matured. Step by step, century by
century, the God concept has evolved until, with the teachings of Ryonin,
Honen Shonin, and Shinran in Japan, this concept finally came to fruit in the
belief in Amida Buddha.

94:12.3 Among these believers it is taught that the
soul, upon experiencing death, may elect to enjoy a sojourn in Paradise prior
to entering Nirvana, the ultimate of existence. It is proclaimed that this new
salvation is attained by faith in the divine mercies and loving care of Amida,
God of the Paradise in the west. In their philosophy, the Amidists hold to an
Infinite Reality which is beyond all finite mortal comprehension; in their
religion, they cling to faith in the all-merciful Amida, who so loves the
world that he will not suffer one mortal who calls on his name in true faith
and with a pure heart to fail in the attainment of the supernal happiness of
Paradise.

94:12.4 The great strength of Buddhism is that its
adherents are free to choose truth from all religions; such freedom of choice
has seldom characterized a Urantian faith. In this respect the Shin sect of
Japan has become one of the most progressive religious groups in the world; it
has revived the ancient missionary spirit of Gautama's followers and has begun
to send teachers to other peoples. This willingness to appropriate truth from
any and all sources is indeed a commendable tendency to appear among religious
believers during the first half of the twentieth century after
Christ.

94:12.5 Buddhism itself is undergoing a
twentieth-century renaissance. Through contact with Christianity the social
aspects of Buddhism have been greatly enhanced. The desire to learn has been
rekindled in the hearts of the monk priests of the brotherhood, and the spread
of education throughout this faith will be certainly provocative of new
advances in religious evolution.

94:12.6 At the time of this writing, much of Asia
rests its hope in Buddhism. Will this noble faith, that has so valiantly
carried on through the dark ages of the past, once again receive the truth of
expanded cosmic realities even as the disciples of the great teacher in India
once listened to his proclamation of new truth? Will this ancient faith
respond once more to the invigorating stimulus of the presentation of new
concepts of God and the Absolute for which it has so long searched?

94:12.7 All Urantia is waiting for the proclamation
of the ennobling message of Michael, unencumbered by the accumulated doctrines
and dogmas of nineteen centuries of contact with the religions of evolutionary
origin. The hour is striking for presenting to Buddhism, to Christianity, to
Hinduism, even to the peoples of all faiths, not the gospel about Jesus, but
the living, spiritual reality of the gospel of Jesus.